Microsoft announced on Tuesday that network managers can now upgrade any Windows PC’s on their networks to the latest version of Internet Explorer 8 via their Windows Server Update Services platform, clearly representing a significant time saver for managers of large networks.

Does this easier to upgrade option mean that large organisations, businesses, schools, universities, colleges, etc., IE6′s last remaining stronghold, will now finally be encouraged to make the move away from IE6?

And could this finally mean an end to Web Designers spending hours ensuring that their latest creations are backward compatible with this last remaining relic of a time long forgotten?

Comments

Microsoft itself is realising that keeping IE6 on the market for any longer, would put them in a position of losing out. Thus the move to autoupdate push of IE8 and the current move as well. Both great ones!

I wouldn’t be too optimistic; IE7 did came via auto-update and for many (corporate) users this didn’t change anything. And Microsoft plans to support IE6 until 2014 – so you can bet that the people who didn’t upgrade to IE7 yet, won’t upgrade to IE8 until they must – in five years.

@Chris – Even if the slowest adopters won’t upgrade to IE8 yet, progress is still progress. IE7 pisses me off from time to time, but not NEARLY as much as IE6 does. I will be glad to see IE6 turn into IE6-feet-under. :)

I’m pretty sure we all pray for IE6 death(fast and painful), but you all know that exists category of users who pretty satisfied with their EI6 and I,m not talking just about old Grannies. Moreover some system administrators let IE6 to survive. And I know couple of them who thoughts that IE6 is good cause it gives them work and justifies their existence in certain company.

I don’t think the fact that MS pushes IE8 or not changes anything. I think the mean reason IE6 still lives is because corporations are still using websites that are essential to them and are built towards IE6′s quircks. The barrier of upgrading is not wether they have to do it themselves or not but rather the cost of upgrading all the systems that depend on IE6. Untill it becomes blatantly clear that having IE6 is more expensive then upgrading the internal IE6 relying systems, nothing will change.

Depending on what you actually mean by “users”, India and China represent the largest IE6 populations, larger than the rest of the world combined. If you discount those countries in your audience, then IE6 is well on it’s way out (low teens, to single digits). Only by factoring these countries in is it “holding on”.

Whether or not that’s appropriate depends, as always, on your site’s actual audience.

Sounds good! When I first read this article I was pleased (as were most of you, I’m sure)! But then I leaned over to my buddies in Web Development and they said that it’s easier said than done.

Schools and Organistaions haven’t upgraded yet, now because its difficult to do so – but because they don’t want to, it works for them. Apparently, some companies have systems in place that will most likely break in anything other than IE6.

To this I say “Time to upgrade!”. Surely they didn’t think that IE6 would be around forever?

Of course the best solution all around is for everyone to switch to firefox (or opera) :)

Thankfully Universities here in the UK seem to be taking a two pronged approach, leaving IE6 in place for those websites/systems that require it, whilst providing firefox for general browsing. Oxford, one of the UK’s most prestigious universities, recommends firefox over IE in announcements to staff and students on its website, and here at Leeds Met all publicly accessible computers now have firefox and ie6 installed side by side. Unfortunately non-public pc’s (in faculties/offices) seem to have missed out on this upgrade – thankfully firefox portable saves my life on a daily basis.

ROCHE (pharmaceutical company in Europe) has their apps running only on IE6 (more than 20.000 workstations). Yes, they have a plan to upgrade either apps or browsers… in the next 10 years ;) Good luck!

The productivity hours that get sucked away into making sites work in IE6 must be countless. I’m surprised no one has sued MS to get their stolen time back.

And I know couple of them who thoughts that IE6 is good cause it gives them work and justifies their existence in certain company.

Compare those 2 Quotes above. One hand I.E 6 is giving some a reason to be employed. On another hand its wasting cumulatively the hours of web developers costing them money in loss of time.
Notice the correlation of Energy Input and output. It basically outsourcing the COST from the web developers and transferring to the person working in the Office that has a job becuase of I.E 6.
Very interesting.

A recent project I was involved with for a large music site saw 30% of their users still using IE6! They likely have many corporate users, but considering we had to fulfill compatibility requirements for any browser that had more than a 1% share, working with IE6 is likely to be around for a very long time to come, whether MS support it or not. It’s a complex site with lots of built-in apps, and I would estimate IE6 support increased development costs for the styling by about 25%.

Sherif, please keep in mind that W3CSchools stats are very heavily skewed, because they rely purely on only their own visitors, who are primarily web developers. They state quite clearly at the bottom of the browser stats this exact fact. If you want a realistic set of stats, check out either the NetApps stats, which are collected from major search engines and portals (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0) or StatCounter GlobalStats, which are taken from many websites that implement their statistics service (http://gs.statcounter.com/).

IE6 is thankfully on the way out, and I’ve lost countless hours to this monstrosity, but let’s be realistic here.